Francesco Poli wrote: > On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 01:38:29 -0500 Glenn Maynard wrote: >>I don't think most >>people find offensive the notion of a sole copyright holder of a GPL- >>licensed work granting proprietary licenses for a fee. > > It's perfectly legal, AFAIK. > I don't particularly like this business model, but there exist many many > worse ones... > > The reasons why I don't like this business model are: > > * in many cases it generates the interest to persuade potential > proprietary-license buyers that the proprietary variant is somewhat > better or the only alternative (possibly contributing to spread FUD > about the GNU GPL) I do agree that such FUD is undesirable and unethical. > * I fail to see the usefulness (from a downstream recipient's point of > view) of a proprietary variant, when a technically identical piece of > software is available under the GNU GPL (the only exceptions are maybe > libraries and the like...) I'm not referring to those who sell proprietary licenses to a separate version of the software; I'm referring to those who use a copyleft license and sell exceptions for people who want to link their proprietary software against that copylefted software. > * some of the downstream recipients do not get freedoms, and this does > not "sound good" In the scenario I'm referring to, both versions are identical, so anyone who wants Free Software will take the GPLed version, and the only people who purchase proprietary licenses will be those who *want* proprietary licenses that work with their proprietary software. - Josh Triplett
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